WAKE ME UP WHEN MY GENDER ENDS

I am here to tell you I have failed to perform gender once againspending another day indoors hiding from the world

choked up over the television show where the audience guessesif subjects are men in disguise or real women.

I suppose I mean to say the word tranny, innocuous in its executionbloodless until you read the news or live inside it

always-forever at the tip of everything’s tongue, too messy to retreatinto its bed to slumber and let us be.

My mistress is silence herself. I think she might be a god or at leastgodlike in the wonder she possesses

unlike static, unlike breathing, unlike thoughts that race with the urgencyof living in a lawless body.

Who is real? Who is allowed to be real? Who speaks themselves intoexistence? Who dreams? Who has words

that froth and boil over with meaning? To fail at this is to soartwice, three times as high as any manmade structure.

So why talk shit. Why make the light hide from itself. Here I am onthe couch with my legs crossed, being alive.

Here I am absorbing the words you have for me, epoch of panicfuture of a disappearing woman.

* * *

Joshua Jennifer Espinoza is a trans woman poet living in California. Her work has been published in PEN America, The Offing, Lambda Literary, The Feminist Wire, West Branch, and elsewhere. She is the author of two poetry collections, i’m alive / it hurts / i love it (boost house, 2014) and THERE SHOULD BE FLOWERS (Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2016).